virgo70 saidThis is just a question my mother took her own life on 01-12-12

I am trying to understand the things that were wrong that she took herself of this earth Yes she had Medical-Mental issues

Those are questions best left unanswered. Pain (emotional and physical) is a very strong emotion/feeling. I'm sorry that you had to experience this tragedy and I hope you have let time begin to do its magic. I'm sure you have begun the ravages of the list of emotions. Let yourself experience all of them, its normal. Be strong for her and be strong for yourself!

Just trust that she is no longer in the pain she suffered from.. My condolences and heartfelt hug!

I'm not sure if anyone can really define when or if it's OK to take your own life. Everyone will have a different opinion based on their own experiences and belief system. I don't know what kinds of medical and mental issues your mother had, and I'm not sure if you will ever fully understand why she did what she did. Unfortunately, there was probably very little you could do to prevent it. Based on my experience, people who commit suicide have given up hope that their situations will ever get better. It's difficult, if not impossible, to convince someone otherwise.

I think that if she had mental health issues, then she can't really be held fully accountable for what happened, she wasn't in her right state of mind. That being said, her judgement may have been clouded or something along those lines. It just had to be a combination of her current emotions and state with the mental issues that could have triggered a response like this. So it may not have been what she truly wanted but because she wasn't in the right mind, she couldn't think about the situation properly.

It's best, at least in my opinion, if you just accept it and don't question why she did it, it's something that can't be answered and constantly thinking about it will just make you want an answer you can't get.

Our lives are our lives and our lives alone. They neither belong nor are they beholden to anyone else. How we experience our lives is how we experience our lives, not how someone else experiences their life. Nobody can live our lives for us because our lives are not their lives. Nobody can tell us how to experience our lives, because how we experience them is not necessarily how someone else might experience their own life. And so, while we all must judge for ourselves as it is natural to do, we only fool ourselves by rendering judgement upon others for how they live and for how they die, because their life is not ours. Only ours is ours and the time they spent with us not ours by right but a privilege they bestowed

That they would then deny us their lives is not selfish on their part but selfish on our part to think so because we have no right to their lives and because we do not know how they experienced their lives. And so if it hurts you because it seems that your mother was selfish by taking her life from you, be generous yourself in allowing your mother the honor of having lived her own life a little for herself. It was, after all, her life, not yours. Peace.

My condolences to you. I cannot begin to imagine the pain you must be going through. I, like the others that have posted, offer you my support at this time. I think that is the mostly what you are going to find here. In the present context, with the recentness of this event in your life, I think an in depth discussion of suicide and when it might be appropriate or not appropriate for medical or mental anguish reasons might be difficult for many to give you at this time.

Sorry about your Mom. It's got to make it even more difficult to know that it was something she did to herself. But just know that people don't kill themselves for no reason. If she took her own life, just know that it was something she needed to do, but you will never know exactly why.

virgo70 saidThis is just a question my mother took her own life on 01-12-12

I am trying to understand the things that were wrong that she took herself of this earth Yes she had Medical-Mental issues

Those are questions best left unanswered. Pain (emotional and physical) is a very strong emotion/feeling. I'm sorry that you had to experience this tragedy and I hope you have let time begin to do its magic. I'm sure you have begun the ravages of the list of emotions. Let yourself experience all of them, its normal. Be strong for her and be strong for yourself!

Just trust that she is no longer in the pain she suffered from.. My condolences and heartfelt hug!

I agree with everything but the first sentence. Please Mark, don't support/promote ignorance. If the answer can be found (and it almost always can be through research), let it be found.

I think there is an answer. Suicide is not a byproduct of life. It's an effect that is committed because of an event...or chain of events. Deciphering the chain of events is the tricky part.

As for the OP: The "Medical-Mental" issues are an effect of a cause. Get the the root of why your mom was a whacked out loony (as most moms are, in some way or another). Dig deep into her childhood events and find out how she was brought up...not by the silver-lined fairy tales she taught you, but the reality of what she had to endure that caused her to go bonkers.

To the OP......Suicide is one of those events that never gives answers or peace to the survivors it just opens questions and guilty feelings. I am sorry that this happened and you have my condolences.As someone that has attempted suicide and was luckily brought back from dead, I can tell you that suicide feels like an answer....the ONLY answer, that allows a person in unbearable, torturous physical/mental pain and agony any semblance of personal control and dignity in the face of endless, barbaric, primal pain and despair.....It is such a complex series of events that lead a person to attempt suicide, that every one is a unique situation....I can only offer that the torture and pain has ended for your mom. Don't dwell on trying to figure it out or justifying it....because you will never have definitive answers...Remember the best and most positive and live your life in a way that honors that memory.Peace to you.Gary

I feel like I have an understanding of one possible reason for wanting to end ones own life.

This past summer, I took magic mushrooms in a non ideal situation. The details of which are not important. The important part was, that because it was a more or less "bad" trip, I had a period of time where all emotion left me. This is no hyperbole; all emotion was gone. I could not even react to having no emotion, because that requires emotion to do so. Everything was objective, bland, and more or less boring. I questioned what it was like to be dead. It seems to intrinsically easy to just cross that invisible line, and be dead. It was just so easy, so simple. It was the pinnacle of "the end" and for some reason I felt like I could come back if I wanted to, even though it's a one way trip. Really it was summed up as a "so what?" idea. So what if I died? It didn't matter. Meh, where's a knife?

I never actually commited the act, as I am still here. It all remained as a thought. When I came down and regained my emotions I thought to myself "...oh my god... was I actually in that mental state? oh my god." I realized where I was. I wanted to commit suicide not out of sadness, dispair, or pain, simply because, it was what it was. It's difficult to articulate without experiencing what it's like to be truly void of emotion, but in that state, death does not matter, at all. It is what it is and who cares if you end it? It really was just a thought of "meh, whatever".

People commit suicide for many reasons, but this is one of them, and I really do understand what it is like now. I know not if that is the reason your mother did what she did. Nevertheless, for one to do the deed, it has to make perfect sense to them and be completely ok to do.

Awe sorry to hear that. Suicide should never be an option. My mom got sick a couple years ago to the brink of dying and she had asked me to give her the pill bottles so she could take her own life. I told her no that I wouldn't do that for her and that she would make it through her illness. If that was even an option in my life I would have told her yes. The owner of the farm where my best friend lives with her bf shot and killed himself one morning, shocked the entire town and his wife didn't even know he was planning on doing that. So sometime you can see it coming and sometimes you cant. Unfortunately once someone has decided to take their own life than there is nothing you can do to stop it.

I'm going to try to explain my greatest concern here and I hope it's not too much of a roundabout way, but if you can bare with me.

There have been a lot of problems in my mothers family. Although my mother managed to break the cycle in our branch, I have seen drugs, divorce, severe emotional problems, prison, murder - crazy issues that run the gamut among my cousins. We've often joked that someone should write an epic novel or start a soap opera about our family - because no one would believe it was all real.

As a genealogist I was convinced that SOMETHING must have been the catalyst to start this ripple effect of fuckedupedness in my family. I went searching and found that it all started with my 2nd great-grandfather who committed suicide in 1929 and his father who committed suicide in 1899. Their suicides were highly publicized in San Francisco, being that they were members of the society set, and their suicide notes were even published in the paper. I conducted in depth research on both of them, learning every little detail that I could about every moment of their lives - every bit that was possible to find. I found a lot of reasons WHY they did it. The knowledge did help (a little) my family members that were alive in 1929 and directly effected by the suicides - but in the end, none of it really mattered.

What really matters, and what I hope you will try to avoid, is that these tragedies continued to effect my family a century after they happened. Even after people had forgotten about them all together. Please do not let this happen to you and your family. Remember the good times, grieve for the loss, realize that there is nothing that you could have done and that it is no ones fault. There is nothing wrong with trying to find answers, but try not to become obsessed with it. Try to move on and love whom you have around you now, they are the most important thing.

There's two broad categories of depression: clinical and existential. Clinical depression is caused by out-of-whack brain chemistry. Existential depression is caused by facing (perhaps rationally) an A or B choice, such as live with crippling pain or die to end the pain.

Clinical depression is most common for otherwise healthy people. If they commit suicide, it's not because of selfishness or any rational process. You cannot feel guilty when this happens. Asking why it happened (as if the deceased could rationalize it) is pointless.

Existential depression is most common with people who are terminal, like my mother getting told she has two weeks--maybe three--to live...and then getting exactly three weeks to think about it. If she had chosen a bottle of pills I would have handed them to her.

mickeytopogigio said If she had chosen a bottle of pills I would have handed them to her.

Two days before her death, my Mother received her first dose of liquid morphine.The nursing staff was slow in delivering it to her as the Dr. had only just prescribed it 2-3 hours before and she was suffering. I went out to the nurse's station and gave them my own sotto voce version of Shirley MacLaine's request in "Terms of Endearment"......She went into a restful sleep and I understood completely the dichotomy of emotions expressed in that movie......so thankful for her not having to suffer.....and so self pitying to never be able to be with her again.

I would say it is not OK to take you life if you have dependents relying on you for support (minor children, elderly parents, mentally incapacitated adult sibling/child, and the like).

If you have no one relying on you for support (who have no alternative), then your life is your own to do with what you will. I especially have no problem with terminally ill people committing suicide with the assistance of a deathcare provider. People freak when you say physician-assisted suicide so I think we need a new profession, deathcare provider - Dr. Kivorkian (not sure of spelling) was ahead of his time. We treat our sick pets better than we do our own species.

That said, I believe taking ones life is the ultimate act of desperation and people in desperation are in no way capable of making rational decisions on their own and would require psychological evaluation and intervention before availing themselves of a deathcare provider-assisted suicide.